El Generalisimo
A Biography of Francisco Franco
Giles Tremlett’s biography of Francisco Franco traces his fast rise through Spain’s military to take lasting totalitarian control of the nation.
Focusing on a span from the end of the Spanish Civil War in 1939 until Franco’s death in 1975, this thorough book identifies the general-turned-dictator’s remarkable determination and confidence and contrasts this with his lack of ideology, allies, or charisma. Franco, it shows, used brutality, nationalism, and censorship to take power in an era of political chaos. The former leader of the cutthroat Spanish Foreign Legion in Africa, he pivoted to politics to fight communism and unions, imposing Catholic morals as law on a country that had grown more liberal. Throughout his reign, individual rights were restricted and elections rigged. Detractors were imprisoned, tortured, thrown from windows, garroted, and sent to the firing squad. This roused loyalty, fear, and leftist rebellion.
Beyond Franco’s nationalism and abundant personal prejudices, the book identifies his fascinating lack of political philosophy as a “calculated ambiguity.” During the civil war, he resisted taking sides; he also allied with Hitler and Mussolini, though he denied this once the fascists began to lose World War II. An inscrutable man, he had few confidants, though the book includes the perspectives of those in his small inner circle where possible. More is available from the work of foreign correspondents who had the freedom to cover news in Spain, whose own journalists were censored. Franco remains mysterious, Tremlett notes, because of his own extreme self-control. Still, this impressive biography shows his profound effect on Spain, which continued to evolve even when its leader would not.
The revealing biography of a dictator whose mind was a cipher, El Generalissimo doubles as a picture of how Spain succumbed to violent authoritarianism.
Reviewed by
Meredith Grahl Counts
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